Have gun, will squirt / 130 compete in Street Wars game, where it's soak or be soaked

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, November 19, 2005

Have gun, will squirt / 130 compete in Street Wars game, where it's soak or be soaked

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For an attempted assassination, there sure was a lot of giggling going on.

"I'm going to feel pretty good about shooting someone, if I don't die first," said would-be assassin Nicole Califano, who was drinking a beer, which was not helping to steady her trigger finger any.

Califano is one of 130 contestants armed with water pistols who are stalking each other this month throughout San Francisco, waiting to ambush and squirt total strangers.

It's called Street Wars, and its creator bills it as a "water gun assassination tournament." It was a big hit last year in New York and Vancouver, British Columbia, where many people have even odder ideas about pastimes than they do here.

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"Think you've got what it takes to be an assassin?" says the game's Web site.

The idea is to squirt your assigned victim before you get squirted by the player who has been assigned to squirt you. Entering the game costs $35. Whoever gets squirted is out of the game, and the last person left dry gets $500.

Some people take their stalking very seriously. Since Monday, when the game began, there have been 40 "kills."

The organizer, who prefers to identify himself only as the Mustache Commander, keeps track of successful squirtings over the Internet.

"This number of kills is truly commendable," the Mustache Commander wrote. "No other place has taken to wetting as fast and with such vigor as you have. I tip my (water) gun to you."

One squirting followed a chase into the victim's basement and a shootout behind a washing machine. Another victim was shot from a Chinatown fire escape.

And there were accounts from the players themselves.

"This is the story of how I died," reported a victim named A.M. "I walked quietly up the stairs. My apartment is at the end of the hall. I saw three people standing outside my door. ... I had nowhere to go. I got up and ran as fast as I could, but alas, I couldn't outrun streams of water. I was hit.

"Granted, it was a little cheap waiting outside my apartment door, but I guess in the end, all's fair in love and war."

Another player, who identified himself as S.A., managed to soak three opponents in two days.

"(For) the latest one, I snuck into opponent's building," S.A. said. "His landlord tipped me off. I waited above the stairwell, watching down. The landlord kept going up and down the steps. After the 10th trip, I hallucinated it was my opponent coming up. I opened fire. The landlord turned and screamed. I had just blasted a gallon of water on the back of his neck. I felt bad.

"A half hour later, my opponent came in. He put up an amazing fight but, in the end, he went down."

Under duress, the Mustache Commander identified himself as Yutai Liao, a San Francisco graphics designer. He said he dreamed up the game because life can be pretty boring sometimes.

"People want action," he said. "People want to live an action movie, not watch it. This game is exciting, it's thrilling, and you really get scared."

The game also seems to involve a lot of waiting around -- sitting in cars, sitting in stairwells and sitting in lobbies -- all while wielding a squirt gun and trying to avoid eye contact with nonplaying passers-by.

In a typical mission the other night, Califano and her pal Dolly Renick seemed to do more giggling than shooting. They opened their game packet and discovered they had been assigned to squirt a fellow who lived on Haight Street. Inside the packet was the fellow's address, his phone number and his picture.

The two friends sat down in a cafe to plot strategy. It soon became apparent that they had watched very few spy movies.

First, they phoned their victim, pretending to be a solicitor, to find out if he was home. But they giggled so much that it didn't work.

"I know who you are," said their intended victim, a man named J.T. "Yeah, yeah, I'm just gonna run into your arms and let you squirt me."

Then he hung up.

The two pals drove to J.T.'s apartment building. They rang his doorbell, something else that assassins in movies don't do. Nobody answered.

Califano, an art student and waitress, and Renick, an ad agency assistant, began poking into neighborhood bars, partly to see if they could spot their victim from his picture and partly because it's fun to poke into bars.

They tried three bars. No victim. Then they headed back to his building and rang all the doorbells at the front entrance, over and over. Someone in another apartment buzzed them in, to make the ringing stop. The two assassins crept up the stairs and took up a position on a second-floor landing, behind a wall, to wait.

They probably weren't trespassing because, by entering the game, J.T. had ceded to his unknown opponents the right to stalk him. But the law on voluntary assassinations is far from clear-cut.

The two friends decided to have themselves some beer while they waited.

"This," said Califano, "is going to hinder our effectiveness."

That's what happened. In the space of 10 minutes, two residents of the apartment building entered the front door and climbed the stairs to the landing. Califano jumped up from her hiding place, fired point blank and soaked them both.

Neither turned out to be J.T.

Both of the innocent bystanders were a bit wet and a bit miffed, although the first victim stuck around long enough to strike up a conversation with Renick and get her phone number.

"This is a waiting game," Renick said, but it wasn't clear if she was talking about Street Wars or romance.

After half an hour, the beer was all gone. The two friends gave up their stakeout and went home.

"Do we have to do this every night?" Califano said. "I mean, I have a full-time job. I don't think I have time for this."